As the bluebell displays start to look past their best in the coming week, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to showcase several more shots from my recent adventures. It’s worth noting how different the light is, depending on the conditions and time of day … it transforms the colour, the saturation and the depth of every scene.

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Bluebells and beech at Kingswood in Kent, shot at 5.40am, just before sunrise.

The warm glow of golden hour, shot around 6.15am in mid-April, Hamstreet Woods.

Hamstreet Woods, captured with the first rays of daylight, around 6am.

This shot was taken a couple of months back on a stunning morning, with magical mists duelling with a warm, milky sunlight. I’ve shot here on several occasions in the past, but with the conditions being so special I was instantly drawn to this symmetrical shot.

What you can’t see in the final edit here is that I was standing at the foot of a 2 foot weir, my boots slowly filling with icy water, attempting to anchor my feet as much as possible lest I go spinning off into the watery vortex below. I especially love the vibrating lines of water at the bottom right & left of this image, caused when the water from the lake makes its way through the narrow archway.

With each week that goes by at this time of year, we lose almost half an hour of daylight. That means the sunrise is fifteen minutes earlier than it was the previous week.... and THAT seemed early!

We're ploughing headlong into the tricky summer months, where chasing the dawn light becomes an enormous commitment. This morning my alarm went off at 4.40am, and for the first time in what seems like an age, I very nearly rolled over and went back to sleep. Except I didn't. I am a light-chasing ninja, tirelessly committed to the cause! For now.

So with that in mind, I was in the car before 5 am and by 5.20 am was heading off into the sleepy surroundings of Kings Wood near Ashford, laden with a heavy backpack. The birds were slowly chorusing and a Tawny Owl's plaintiff hoots were echoing in the canopy far above me.

I wasn't especially enamoured with the light or the conditions, but when I took the image (above) I had an artistic vision of the woodland awakening from its slumber. The area I was shooting in was perfect, with massive mature beech trees well spaced out from one another, each one slowly rising to greet the new day as the sun's rays danced on their statuesque trunks.

5.20am. I closed the car door, pulled my hat down tight over my ears, adjusted my headlamp, grabbed my tripod, and headed out into the murky darkness of the woodland.

One of the joys of shooting at sunrise is that you are forever emerging into the unknown qualities of the day ahead, as if in a state of perpetual motion. As I picked my way through the intricate maze of paths that knit together to form this fabulous woodland tapestry, I was joined by a crescendo of chorusing songbirds, infusing me with joy at the prospect ahead. I could sense the bluebells before I actually made eye contact with them, and as I neared the boundary of the woodland I was able to turn my headlamp off. My eyes slowly acclimatised to the deep shadows and the emerging mid-tones, and I could just make out the carpet of blue, hovering over the vibrant limes of the bluebell leaves.

I took my time.

Woodlands are notoriously challenging to shoot as they're inherently 'messy' places, compositionally speaking, and it was a good twenty minutes before I took my camera out of its bag and began shooting. I'd planned my location well, at a point close to the edge of the woods, facing towards the South East, in order to enjoy the first rays of sunlight, and as the sun rose the quality of the colours changed, minute-on-minute. The Blue Hour light was perfect to capture the tones of the bluebells themselves but as warmer hues emerged from the sun, the blues receded and the limes of the beech leaves became translucent and radiant in my compositions.

Yesterday I made the trip to a local woodland here in Kent to enjoy the emerging bluebell displays. We’re still a few days short of a full flush, but I enjoyed the transitions we're currently seeing from the anemone's of early spring to the bluebells of mid-spring.

While I was scouring the woodland for interesting angles and attempting to decode this most chaotic of scenes I decided to get a little experimental with my photography. I took a series of images that I conceived as '50mm stitch' pictures ... ie, a range of multiple shots of a scene taken from the same spot to build up a tapestry that can then be stitched together in Photoshop for a super-high resolution image. This thinking-outside-the-box led me to look upwards to the skies to see how the canopy of leaves was doing as it emerges from its winter slumber. The skeletal shape of the trees was still intact, but with burgeoning pops of backlit colour from the warm spring sunlight.

I found a gap in the trees where they converged, as if whispering in conspiracy with one another, took my wide angled lens and shot directly up towards the sky. The result is, I think, an intimate shot of a relationship we rarely see.

Last week the stars aligned (pardon the pun) for some Milky Way shooting. The night ahead looked clear, from what I could gather from my phalanx of weather Apps, there was a new moon and I had plenty of enthusiasm for the chase... even though it meant getting up at around 1.30am.

I've done a little Night Sky photography in the past, but I've never created any specific goals of capturing the galactic core of the Milky Way. I knew that there was a 'season' during the which the core is visible (February to November, fact fans), but I didn't know where exactly to look, or how to time the shoot. So I did what any good photography geek would do, and dived deep into Photo Pills to meticulously plan the night ahead.

I'd planned to head to Folkestone Warren. The tide was receding and I was confident I could pull off an image with some interesting jetties in the foreground, with the Milky Way arching across the sky. As I drove down the hill into Folkestone at 2.30am, it was such a clear night I could see the lights of the French Coast clearly, and immediately realised there was wayyy too much light pollution here to get a decent capture. I quickly recalibrated and headed off on the 45-minute cross-country drive to Fairfield Church. This is a beautifully remote spot on the Romney Marsh, and somewhere I've shot many times, but I felt like it was the best bet at short notice.

On arrival I noticed it was breezier than I'd expected which created quite a wind chill, and before long my hands were freezing as I fumbled to set up compositions and angles I was happy with. The biggest issue, though, was light pollution. Even though this spot feels right out in the middle of nowhere, there are a few houses nearby, and one of them has a raft of blinding floodlights shining pointlessly into the night sky. What made these lights even more grating was the fact that they were shining right at the very base of the Milky Way, where it was rising in the sky, and it was almost impossible to find an angle where I could successfully obscure them from appearing in the frame. Then there's the light pollution from Ashford, which may be some fifteen miles away, but its lights are glaringly obvious from that distance.

As I started to shoot, I noticed that there was a very subtle amount of super thin high cloud streaking across the sky. It was barely perceptible to the naked eye, but in-camera it was very obvious as it picked up all the ambient light from the neighbouring area. I managed to get a couple of shots that were useable, but next time an opportunity arises to capture the galactic core, I'll be heading to a Dark Sky Area, far from the lights of our bustling world.

As my regular readers will know, I am a student of sunrise. In the last few years, I've routinely woken in the early hours and taken magical mystery trips into the unknown with my camera in hand. But I struggle to recall a morning as saintly as this one.

I love how it sits, proud but isolated in a gently rolling field, surrounded by woodland in the shadow of the North Downs.

This was a bit of a renegade (unplanned) shoot, as I’d woken early and decided to head out to see what the light was offering from the top of the hills. If anything I was a little later than I should have been because the best light was quickly evaporating, even though it was still early. I noticed a beautiful streak of pinkness in the sky and knew it would be gone within minutes, so pulled over by the tree, ran into the field and quickly got the shot.

The day after our trip to the Brecon Beacons I woke up absolutely exhausted and a touch demoralised. The weather was stark, grey and mainly overcast so I felt a change of tempo and tone was in order and headed into the heart of Orlestone Forest in Kent to see if I could capture some springlike woodland scenes.

I know this woodland like the back of my hand, having mountain biked and walked my dogs there for many years. This stand of Redwood trees has always been a favourite of mine, but I'd never found the opportunity to shoot them until now. The conditions were perfect, with gentle rays of milky light side-lighting the trunks.

I'm really happy with how this particular shot turned out and will be adding it to the online store shortly.